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Just as identifications cluster together to form an identity, so the many personae of Erik Erikson cluster together in Lawrence Friedman's new biography to form a portrait or, perhaps more accurately, a collage of a complex and talented individual who dared to be himself. The private Erikson might have been uncomfortable with some of the heartaches of his life being exposed publicly, but as a biographer himself I think Erikson would have recognized the care and appreciated the scholarship with which Friedman handled the sensitive material.
Friedman picks up several threads in Erikson's life and connects them to weave a tapestry that gives us a sense of the configuration that was Erik Erikson—a man who did not know his father, and, in addition, had complicated identifications with his artistic temperament, his professional affiliations, his Jewish heritage, his German nationality, and his adopted country, the United States. To more fully appreciate this biography we must bear in mind that Erik Erikson was a psychoanalyst of such distinction that Robert S. Wallerstein has asserted that “after Freud, no single psychoanalyst has had a more profound impact on our twentieth-century culture and the world than he.” Erikson is perhaps best known for his first book, Childhood and Society, but other books such as Young Man Luther, Identity: Youth and Crisis, and Ghandi's Truth are considered classics. He is well known for his formulations of psychosocial development, his play configuration studies, his landmark works in psychobiography, and his coining of the term “identity crisis.”
With such accomplishments to his name, some might assume Erikson was a man of singular purpose and direction. But in Friedman's book we learn of a man moving back and forth across borders between an identification with a father he never knew and a stepfather who did not look like him; between his Jewish family heritage and the blond hair, blue eyes, and tall stature he had inherited from his unknown